wish I was normal

I just can't withstand the fact that their are people my age or younger working and have jobs. It makes me upset to know that I am around their age and I am still living with My parents. Sometimes I wonder if the status quo will ever change. Is any body out their in a similar situation?

Hey Skagey~
I too feel the same way & I am even older than CG!!! I haven't been able to hold a job since 1986. That works on a person.

I've been married to a really wonderful guy for the last 10 yrs. I started out

taking care fo him, as he has advanced degenerative disk disease & serious arthrits in his neck & back.

Now, I just hoping one day I can get back to taking care of him!!!

about all we can do is take everything one day at a time. Once you have had success with healing, then it's time to think about a job.

You are not in too bad of a position, actually. At least you don't have to worry about having a roof over your head & food to eat. It breaks

my heart to read or hear that another lymie has to worry about these essentials because they can't work.

Hang in there!! It's good that you came here to voice what you're feeling.

Rose:
Thank you for your post. I have been sick for three months, so sick I have had to take a leave at work with no clear sense if I'll ever get back. I do believe we will all get better: I just have so many days when I am so acutely ill I think I truly am going to die. But, as you say, there are always things to be grateful for: I have a wonderful and supportive husband, a job that I can just take leave from, good and reputable doctors, and children whose lives are my greatest blessing. The fact that one is in Paris and I can't go visit her, and the other will join her there for Christmas, are things I need to put in perspective. I too was envying a very energetic looking 70-something woman today, as I crawled back to my car after going for homeopathy.
Pam

Pam - your post really touched me, especially the last sentence. Sometimes I wonder how we find a place inside us to adjust to the reality of the PAIN and misery that haunt our days and nights. I feel skagy guy's thread title; I want to be normal, too. I honestly do not remember what it is like to sleep through the night and to wake up feeling refreshed, to assume when I rise that I can do what I want without a thought of whether or not my body will let me, to plan a trip or a social event without concern that I won't be able to make it at the last minute because I am sick, to participate fully in life without negotiating through a haze of pain and other distracting symptoms. Normal looks enticing from here, but I can't say I have a clear concept of how it would feel anymore. There are days when the anguish of realizing what I don't have eats into my soul. I don't want to battle depression or fear anymore, or to remain positive on days where I feel so awful I'm wishing I could die because any end of this suffering is more attractive than living with it. That's where I go on my dark days.

I don't let myself go there very often, but I think it is therapeutic sometimes to express these feelings because they are real, and honest. It takes courage not only to be positive in the face of adversity, but also to face the beast as it is and to talk about the underbelly of optimism; a more unsettling place to linger. When I am finished, I pop back up to the positive certainty that I will get better, and even feel gratitude that this disease has taught me patience and humility and empathy at a level not possible had I not suffered so much. Lyme facilitates character building. That's the greatest gift I've gotten as compensation for my suffering. I am a far better person, more insightful, more caring, more understanding BECAUSE I have been so sick for so long and because I must work so hard to overcome this. I want to get healthy and to go on from here, but I can't really say I'd change where I've been. Probably that's the most normal I can get.

Rose

Rose:
You write beautifully: it is hard to imagine that Lyme has eroded your intellectual functioning too much. I think I am still in the 'denial' phase of this illness: thought when I got sick that I was looking at a couple of weeks, then a delayed vacation to the beach; then it became a doctoral program I had to leave, and work I cannot do, and the reality of many more months - years - of treatment, with an uncertain outcome. I practiced some meditation before I got sick, but sustaining it through this is very difficult. One thing I read somewhere - someone's Lyme blog, I believe - that has been very helpful in terms of my ability to stay connected with my family is that we do not need to 'do', as mothers and wives and friends, we just need to 'be'. Looks like we are all struggling mightily to find a way to 'be' that keeps us living as vital members of our families, that is pain-free enough to be tolerable. That's actually my only goal these days.